Do angry vegans turn you against going vegan?

[Athos]

These problems occur in all moral domains. For example most people accept that it's generally wrong to kill other humans but there are numerous disputes about when it is permissible to kill (e.g. war, abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so forth). Similarly it's not incoherent to think that it's generally wrong to exploit and kill animals whilst acknowledging that there are tricky cases where it might be okay (often these cases are tricky for epistemic rather than normative reasons - I don't know anything about guide dogs or potential viable alternatives so I'm loath to comment without possession of all the relevant information).

Of course. And i wouldn"t accuse you of incoherence.

I guess we seek to resolve some of those dilemmas (to some extent) with conceptions of human rights.

Your answer presents the obvious question of what it is about those situations where it might be ok that makes them different from those where it is not. Without being able to point to that, it's hard to explain veganism on anything nor than sentimental grounds (not that that"s necessarily a problem).

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Of course. And i wouldn"t accuse you of incoherence.

I guess we seek to resolve some of those dilemmas (to some extent) with conceptions of human rights.

Your answer presents the obvious question of what it is about those situations where it might be ok that makes them different from those where it is not. Without being able to point to that, it's hard to explain veganism on anything nor than sentimental grounds (not that that"s necessarily a problem).

There are a variety of different ethical theories one could plug in, but at it's simplest for me it's the harm principle. It's prima facie wrongful to harm others unless you have sufficiently weighty reasons for doing so. This is why killing animals for food is an easy case for me: we inflict huge harm on animals (torture, suffering and killing) and the reasons we do so are not sufficiently weighty (pleasure and convenience basically). Guide dogs are a harder case because, without knowing the facts at least, it is not clear to what extent guide dogs are harmed per se (clearly far less than factory farmed animals at any rate) and the interest they serve looks sufficiently weightier than mere pleasure and convenience. I'm not conceding that guide dogs are morally permissible btw, I just don't have the knowledge required for an informed assessment.

Hard cases are unavoidable however, whatever ethical theory you plug in, in any context (human rights raise numerous complex issues, as the voluminous jurisprudence of HR courts and tribunals show us).

 

[Athos]

There are a variety of different ethical theories one could plug in, but at it's simplest for me it's the harm principle. It's prima facie wrongful to harm others unless you have sufficiently weighty reasons for doing so.

Interesting. But presents more questions e.g. whether the question of sufficiency turns on the nature of the other.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Interesting. But presents more questions e.g. whether the question of sufficiency turns on the nature of the other.

The capacity of the other to be harmed, and the extent to which they can be harmed, are all that matters about their nature. This is to me is the singularly most beautiful ethical insight of veganism, animal rights etc.

 

[Athos]

The capacity of the other to be harmed, and the extent to which they can be harmed, are all that matters about their nature. This is to me is the singularly most beautiful ethical insight of veganism, animal rights etc.

And by what do you measure that capacity? And what abouts to harm e.g. an imposition on liberty, physical pain, etc.?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Jeremy Bentham on this 200 years ago still sounds remarkably modern.

Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things. ... The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated ... upon the same footing as ... animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?... The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes...

I agree with him that 'Can they suffer?' is the right question, and 'stand degraded into the class of things' is a very good way of putting it. However, 'extending its mantle over everything which breathes' is difficult, practically difficult as much as anything, as a consequence of the nature of life itself and competition for limited resources. At best we negotiate a path through life aware of these issues. I don't see a resolution of them as ever being possible.

I think Bentham would be rather disappointed to discover where we are 200 years on.

 

[Pickman's model]

I think Bentham would be rather disappointed to discover where we are 200 years on.

Does he sound modern on punishment, lbj? Bit pick and mix this. But we all know where (most of) Bentham is 200 years on.

 

[bimble]

The capacity of the other to be harmed, and the extent to which they can be harmed, are all that matters about their nature. This is to me is the singularly most beautiful ethical insight of veganism, animal rights etc.

Can oysters be harmed or do you have to have a nervous system for that?

 

[Pickman's model]

Can oysters be harmed or do you have to have a nervous system for that?

oysters have nervous systems, chuck


[Content removed at request of poster]

 

[Jeff Robinson]

And by what do you measure that capacity? And what abouts to harm e.g. an imposition on liberty, physical pain, etc.?

We measure this capacity with both our common sense and the best available information from the empirical sciences.

An individual is harmed to the extent that their interests are set back and their interests are determined by the natures. With regard to liberty, the more autonomous the being is the the greater the harm in restricting their liberty. A normal adult human being has a nature such that denying them liberty is a serious setting back of their interests. A small child or a severely cognitively impaired human (I.e in the late stages of dimentia) have very much weaker liberty interests as do many nonhuman animals. Certain nonhuman animals such as the great apes, cetaceans, elephants, parrots and corvidae have a degree of practical autonomy such that they have some liberty interests.

When it comes to physical (and mental) pain and suffering, this is something that all sentient beings have an interest in avoiding. Sentient beings share a nature such that pain of the same duration and intensity is (all else equal) equally harmful regardless of the organism it manifests in. (See Bentham quote above)

There are other interests too, but that's just a response to the two you mentioned.

 

[PaoloSanchez]

Serious question - is English your first language?

Serious question - was that a serious question?

You see no difference between keeping an animal for meat and keeping an animal as a pet.

I really don't see any distinction; meat animals are fed, watered, sheltered, medicated. Some of them are probably named and get their ears scratched. They broadly get from people what pets get from people.

Pets on the whole are usually treated MUCH better than animals bred for food, not always the case but mostly so. Also pets don't usually have a bolt shot through their head and their throats cut, but apart from those two glaring differences, I guess they're both exactly the same.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

We measure this capacity with both our common sense and the best available information from the empirical sciences.

An individual is harmed to the extent that their interests are set back and their interests are determined by the natures. With regard to liberty, the more autonomous the being is the the greater the harm in restricting their liberty. A normal adult human being has a nature such that denying them liberty is a serious setting back of their interests. A small child or a severely cognitively impaired human (I.e in the late stages of dimentia) have very much weaker liberty interests as do many nonhuman animals. Certain nonhuman animals such as the great apes, cetaceans, elephants, parrots and corvidae have a degree of practical autonomy such that they have some liberty interests..

Yes, I don't see any other way to approach this. In the case of cetaceans and elephants, the only conclusion possible is that captivity of any kind is a cause of suffering. This is starting to dawn on more people now I think.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Can oysters be harmed or do you have to have a nervous system for that?

They lack a central nervous system but they do have nerve ganglia. I think the dominant view is that they are not sentient, and in which case they cannot be harmed on my view . But I don't eat them for two reasons (well three if you include me thinking they taste gross!). First, I adopt a precautionary principle and avoid interfering with a potentially sentient being when I don't need to, and second because consuming other animals, even if they are not sentient, is part of a culture that I don't want to support or endorse. Can't fully articulate the second thought ATM, but that's roughly it.

 

[PaoloSanchez]

I certainly think we shouldn't breed obligate carnivores period. I certainly think that we should adopt and foster companion animals rather than buy them from breeders. I suspect that pet ownership generally is wrong. Can breeding guide dogs be justified? I'm not sure. It's an issue I hadn't considered until you asked me. Veganism, like every ethical doctrine, has to deal with hard cases, but I'm not so interested in discussing those whilst there are practices so manifestly and obviously unjust as our use of animals for food.

I always felt uneasy about feeding my our cat Whiskas when we were looking after her. Domestic cats and dogs exist. Perhaps we shouldn't really be breeding them or even be encouraging the breeding of them but they are already here and they sometimes breed themselves independently of us. Feeding cat food from animals that have been killed is a dilemma that some vegans have to face. Some deal with it by not having cats at all, and a very small minority try to do so by feeding them fortified plant based foods, and some will give them regular cat food, like we did (after trying different options which she didn't like). Now I don't have a cat and have no plans to get another one, however if one did appear on my doorstep again that needed help I might be in the same position again.

As you said compared to all the other issues surrounding the treatment of animals, this is a comparatively minor one. The impression that I get is that people who are not vegan and don't really have an interest in becoming vegan try to make mischief and use these kind of side issues to find every little chink in the vegan amoury, so that if you're not what they consider to be a 100% perfect vegan, it justifies their meat consumption.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

They lack a central nervous system but they do have nerve ganglia. I think the dominant view is that they are not sentient, and in which case they cannot be harmed on my view . But I don't eat them for two reasons (well three if you include me thinking they taste gross!). First, I adopt a precautionary principle and avoid interfering with a potentially sentient being when I don't need to, and second because consuming other animals, even if they are not sentient, is part of a culture that I don't want to support or endorse. Can't fully articulate the second thought ATM, but that's roughly it.

We touched on this earlier in the thread. In order to suffer, you need to have a mind. Few people - well, perhaps phildwyer - argue that only humans have minds. That's clearly ludicrous. But it is a tricky thing to establish where mind starts.

Various things I have read trying to grapple with this have come up with the idea of a 'proto-mind' to describe marginal cases, but I'm not so sure how helpful that is. In The feeling of what happens, Antonio Damasio makes a distinction between what he calls an 'extended consciousness' that encompasses awareness of past and future and a more immediate consciousness lacking extension across time and space. He only very reluctantly admits that elephants show evidence of limited extended consciousness, where I would say they show bountiful evidence of extension equal to that of humans. When I first read Damasio, I thought he was mostly right, but since then I've reached the conclusion that he fell into the trap of using humans as the measure of things and unconsciously perhaps setting humans at the top not as a conclusion but as an assumption.

All that said, for the purposes of arguments over meat-eating, I would say that the animals we breed for meat all have minds. We should certainly assume that they do. And I think most people would accept that. In that at least, we have perhaps moved somewhat towards Bentham.

 

[bimble]

littlebabyjesus May I recommend.. "Other Minds - the Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life".
(I haven't finished yet but it is a very good book).
He talks about how impossible it is to not do that, not use our selves - our bodies and brains and experience - as the measuring stick.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

littlebabyjesus May I recommend.. "Other Minds - the Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life".
(I haven't finished yet but it is a very good book).

Ta. I will recommend to you Beyond Words.

Best book on the subject I've read, it reverses many of the usual scientific protocols regarding attaching intention to the behaviour of other animals (never do it unless you can prove it, and even then you're committing professional suicide), and gives a very robust scientific justification for doing so.

 

[PaoloSanchez]

Jeremy Bentham on this 200 years ago still sounds remarkably modern.

I agree with him that 'Can they suffer?' is the right question, and 'stand degraded into the class of things' is a very good way of putting it. However, 'extending its mantle over everything which breathes' is difficult, practically difficult as much as anything, as a consequence of the nature of life itself and competition for limited resources. At best we negotiate a path through life aware of these issues. I don't see a resolution of them as ever being possible.

I think Bentham would be rather disappointed to discover where we are 200 years on.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have been one of "The French" that Jeremy was referring to...

"By this method also we put an end to the time-honored disputes concerning the participation of animals in natural law: for it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognize that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality, being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the latter at least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by the former."

I would also recommend two out of print books that discuss this topic in more depth by Hans Reusch.
The Slaughter Of The Innocent
The Naked Empress

 

[littlebabyjesus]

He talks about how impossible it is to not do that, not use our selves - our bodies and brains and experience - as the measuring stick.

Maybe. But in our culture at least there is often an unspoken assumption of humans somehow naturally at the top. I think I blame a lot of this on religion, and the Abrahamic religions in particular: the idea that god made humans in its own image and that the world is here for us is a poisonous one.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

While we're recommending books, I've just read a remarkable book, Elephants on the Edge by GA Bradshaw.

She uses tools developed for human psychiatry to analyse case studies of abused elephants. It's an attempt at cross-species psychiatry, explaining transgressive behaviour in terms of attachment theory and trauma theory. But she does not crudely place human categories on elephants, rather seeing how the categories might fit given our differences, comparing yes, but not assuming human superiority, as open to learning about humans from elephants as vice versa.

 

[mojo pixy]

Vegan. Sounds like hedgen

/edit: it's tickling me just now because before this week it had never occurred to me. This is what happens when a word gets repeated over and over in my head, it begins to disintegrate and reform in unpredictable ways.

But this is an epiphanic moment for me.

 

[AnnaKarpik]

Serious question - was that a serious question?

You see no difference between keeping an animal for meat and keeping an animal as a pet.

Pets on the whole are usually treated MUCH better than animals bred for food, not always the case but mostly so. Also pets don't usually have a bolt shot through their head and their throats cut, but apart from those two glaring differences, I guess they're both exactly the same.

The point that you are at pains to miss is that it makes no difference to a meat animal who eats it at the end of its life. If you buy meat you are supporting the meat industry.
If I paraphrase you might get it; I see no difference between you eating meat and you purchasing meat so that your cat can eat it. And by difference, as you assuredly need that pointing out too, I mean that the animals killed for food will not be treated any better or worse because of the end-user's species.

You seem to be saying that the the manner of a pet's death is important rather than the fact of it. Why does that not apply to meat animals?

 

[Athos]

Sentient beings share a nature such that pain of the same duration and intensity is (all else equal) equally harmful regardless of the organism it manifests in.

Can you sensibly assert equalivalence between humans and animals with a parenthetical "all else equal"?

Eta: Though I guess, in fairness, that question goes less to the nature and extent of harm as to the question of whether there's a moral imperative to avoid harm of a particular type and intensity regardless of species.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Can you sensibly assert equalivalence between humans and animals with a parenthetical "all else equal"?

Eta: Though I guess, in fairness, that question goes less to the nature and extent of harm as to the question of whether there's a moral imperative to avoid harm of a particular type and intensity regardless of species.

The parentheses were there to denote that there might be relevant factors other than the intensity and duration of pain that might be harmful for the individual. For example the pain might also impose an opportunity cost on the individual experiencing the pain that make it all things considered worse than the same amount of pain of another individual who does not also experience a compariable opportunity cost.

E.g person A is a professional athlete who gets a knee injury. They cannot perform competitively as a result.

Person B is not a professional athlete who gets the same injury, but their career is not adversely impacted in the same way.

Although both experience the same quantity of suffering, person B is harmed more because of the additional opportunity cost they suffer. But species is not of direct relevance to this point.

 

[Casually Red]

This is a massive load of bollocks . If some animals eg cats..big and small...are thoroughly meat eating then the principle of " meat is murder " is blown clean out of the water . If those animals have the same agency as humans..as vegans maintain....then meat eating is fair game . It's not murder . Lions and tigers eat other species...there's a hierarchy . So do we . That's it .meat eating is totally natural and normal, and therefore how it was intended . Capitalism doesn't make a lioness eat a gazelle . Nor does patriarchy . It's what thy eat . Capitalism doesn't make a crocodile eat a water buffalo . Capitalism doesn't make carrion eaters like vultures, crows etc eat dead animals . A complete natural order were other species are fir game does . And that's why we eat other species...like loads of other species do .
Vegans are fucking mental and everyone knows it . A foppish cosmopolitan fad/ disorder .

Fops !!

 

[Casually Red]

This is bollocks . Some species eat other species . If a shark / crocodile/ lion/ tiger / polar bear eats me ...it's not his fucking ethics that are the problem . It's me being a nice source of tasty protein that he wants to eat is the problem . That's how it is for all species .

Vegans...stop being wankers . By that I mean eat whatever makes you happy . Don't eat what makes you unhappy . But take yourselves the fuck off and stop lecturing us with your fucking idiocy .

 

[IC3D]

If there is a natural hierarchy at what point did humans go off message Casually Red? What are the characteristics of a human natural order? Vegans don't maintain cats have the agency to choose their diet, you're confused.

 

[Casually Red]

I'm not confused . Humans are the apex predator, top of the food chain . Everyone under us is fair game .

 

[IC3D]

vegans aren't apex predators though

 

[Yossarian]

I'm not confused . Humans are the apex predator, top of the food chain .

Might be true on land in most of Europe now, but not as soon as you step into the sea.